Weight Watchers and Medifast – Can You Use Them Together? My Opinion

I recently received correspondence where the writer asked me if she could combine both the Medifast and the weight watchers diets. Specifically, she wanted to use the Medifast shakes, the oatmeal, some of the soups, and the pudding while also making use of weight watcher’s smart ones frozen food line. She wanted to know if I would advise this practice and if I thought it would work to help her lose some weight. I will tell you what I told her in the following article.

Combining The Weight Watcher’s Smart Ones Foods With The The Other Diet’s Food Options: I suppose it would not be fair for me to tell the writer that she could not try this practice. After all, it is physically possible to do so. But, my opinion is that she should not do this for the long term. Of course, I’m certainly not a doctor or an expert and I would most certainly want her to seek the opinion of one. But, from my research and own experience, the smart ones meals have way too many calories, carbohydrates and sugars for you to be able to successfully and quickly lose the weight that you would have lost on the other diet. Keep in mind that my experience has been on this particular diet, so my opinion might be a biased one based on my own positive results.

But, I believe that Medifast works because it limits calories, as well as sugars and carbs. In doing this, it allows for your body to get into ketosis where it is able to burn fat rather than carbohydrates. From my research and experience, I know that the average person consumes way too much sugar and carbs. And from looking at the nutritional information for the smart ones, it appears that these foods do very little to address this problem. I will look at some specific foods in both diets to demonstrate this point below.

Comparing The Nutrition, Sugars, And Carbs In Smart Ones With The Similar Content Of Medifast Foods: To examine the content of both foods, I’m going to look at concrete examples from both diets. First, I’ll look at some breakfast meals. The weight watcher’s English muffin sandwich has 210 calories, 3 grams of sugars, and 27 grams of carbs. The Medifast cinnamon apple oatmeal has 100 calories, 1 gram of sugar, and 15 of carbs. As you can see, one diet has about 1/2 of the bad stuff as the other.

Medifast asks that you eat one healthful fresh meal that you prepare each day. This is known as the “lean and green” meal and most people take this at dinner. It is for this reason that I’ll be now comparing lunch foods. From the smart ones line up, I’ll look at the Santa Fe beans and rice. This one logs on 310 calories, 6 grams of sugars, and 51 carbs. Now, let’s check out the Medifast chili. You’re looking at under 1/2 the calories (with only 110.) You’re looking at much less sugar, at only one gram. And, the carbohydrate content is a low 15 grams.

The Bottom Line: Obviously this article is based partially on my own experiences and biases. But, I also believe that comparing the foods side by side makes a pretty persuasive argument that one of these diets gives you a greater chance of success than the other. It has less than half of the calories, carbs, and sugars of the other. In my experience, you need for all of these numbers to be favorable to lose the most weight in the quickest manner possible.

It doesn’t make sense to interrupt the success that you might have by eating foods outside of the plan a couple of times per day. In this way, you are potentially derailing your progress and undoing all of the strides that you’ve made that day. Medifast is designed to work as a system. There’s nothing to stop anyone from taking bits and pieces from two different diets, but why would you? In my opinion, the reason people go on a diet is to lose weight in the quickest manner possible. And in my opinion, combining these two diets does not have the potential to accomplish this as well as sticking with one diet as directed.